ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Narrating Migration in Nordic Countrieswe look through life stories, in almost every one we see quite strongfeelings of protest against the occupation of Latvia by Soviet troops—this is the conflict component. Then, many persons tell that they wereengaged in more than one organization and they had relations withmass media and people or politicians outside the local community(even outside the country and in Soviet Latvia, too)—so, different networkswere employed in their activities. Interviews also revealed somemore or less persistent disagreements and frictions within the Latviandiaspora along the lines of leftist and right-wing politics and in theirdaily lives because of suspicions about collaboration with the secretservices of the Soviet state. This shows that participation in organizationsand community may be restrictive to one`s identity. In that case,to maintain individual autonomy people are likely to be a part of a SM,rather than a particular organization. This is one difference betweenan organization and a movement—a SM does not require one specificloyalty, as is the case within an organization. So, although migrantsmight be split due to political or other specific preferences, the needto preserve their collective identity—in this instance, to bring theLatvian independence problem to the international arena—tied themtogether in an exile social movement. We also have to remark that performingdifferent activities with reference to Latvia is a way of expressingone’s own lifestyle and sustaining an identity.For understanding and explaining social movements there existtwo main approaches in sociology. They are known as the ResourceMobilization Theory and the New Social Movement theories. Whatfollows is a few words about both of these and how they fit to describethe Latvian or any other exile movement.Resource Mobilization Theory (RM). This school of socialmovement analysis, developed from the 1960s onward, has beenand remains the dominant approach among sociologists. The mostremarkable theoreticians in this field are the Americans John Mc-Carthy and Mayer Zald, whose works coined the name of this approach(McCarthy, Zald, 1973). RM theory stresses the ways in which a potentialfor protest behaviour becomes an actual activity. Researchers lookat how groups in that process organize to pursue their ends by mobilizingand managing resources. RM theorists argue that affluence and176